Means of Grace
by Senri
Summary: Kakuzu would enjoy pushing his thread through Hidan's flesh for no reason but his own pleasure. He'd enjoy tiptilting the monk's pretty smiles. He'd like it.


.._a psychopathic god..._

* * *

Hidan has a beautiful smile when he chooses to demonstrate it: winsome, beguiling, a caricature of sweetness. A smile without ferocity or teeth, or the glimpse of pink tongue. A smile that makes him a pale icon by when he kneels in the sun or toys with his scythe, or gives a sinner one last kind glimpse of shamming grace. 

A smile coating violence, like sugar around a pocket of cyanide, like gangrene rotting a limb inside-out. Like a maggot buried in healthy flesh.

It makes Kakuzu want to sew up his fine lips in a black ant-track grin, zip up the pious killer's bile and violence into the slender, pretty face over which girls croon. It would be safer that way, and maybe the punctures would turn black and green with rot, fester and drip, and drain out some of the poison. What's more, Kakuzu would enjoy pushing his thread through Hidan's flesh for no reason but his own pleasure. He'd enjoy locking up the monk's pretty smiles. He'd like it.

* * *

_the grace we need to find will not be found by the graceful only_

* * *

The Nibi vessel is a beautiful woman, lithe, very trim. Lovely when she falls too: like a swan with wings wrenched from its sockets. Her hair cornsilk bound tight. 

Kakuzu kneels beside her. Shinobi women generally have more meat on them, she's slender to be a paid killer, but her muscles are sharply cut. Blood is still rolling sluggishly out of her body but Nii Yugito is awake, and still conscious in spite of the pain she is in. Her eyes gleam nickel, pale blue like frosted panes of glass, and there's a lot of blood soaked into her skin. He's going to sew her up, insure her life for a while longer, just so that she lives until they can take what they need. He'd carry her back to headquarters himself if Zetsu wasn't responsible for that kind of thing.

There's no plea for mercy in her eyes, no question _why?_ or frantic denial. Only that cool gaze trained on his face. A feline evaluation of her fate, piercing into the future, the submerged death-wish in every psyche rising up like a leviathan from the deep.

He weaves his thread into her guts and muscle, and Nii Yugito trembles as if he's scraping her heart with a hot pin, hands clasping tightly, her fingernails split and bloody, pretty face unserene. It's a shame. She's a hurting woman at the last, and not a shinobi. But then, what could he really have expected...? This, after all, is the denouement of her life. This, after all, is her death.

He unwraps her pale mass of hair from its linen binding, and the blond locks coil like affectionate cat's-tails around his fingers.

When he sweeps her hair away, it must pain her: a few gleaming strands catch in his ring and pull out. But that's only a drop in a sea of agony, and now she doesn't flinch.

* * *

_between two worlds I do belong_

* * *

Kakuzu was born in the sea, and by the sea. He barely remembers his home village: and what remains there are the foundations of the houses, the bare tracework of rooms remaining on the forest floor, where loam and needles have almost smothered the last traces of habitation. The ocean remains constant, the brutal cliffs, and the cold breeze.

Leaving Hidan on the shore, he wades in at the place where the pier once was, where he used to kick his feet above the murky water and dangle a baited hook down for fish, and shedding his human form like the too-small skin it is he slips into the current like a drug into bloodstream and dives. A morass, a black mass, the original devil-fish, and he's never felt this way for any woman, or any amount of money, like he feels being in his homeland, at the sea.

The stitches pull loose, the white masks fold into his inner body, leaving him featureless, streamlined. The waters around are lightless, and rumbling-deep, and currents take hold of him in their cool hands. The ocean is cold, immense, but there's life for people who know where to look. Someday (not today) he won't come back. He'll just go out forever and learn secrets, unearth treasures, forget pretending to be a human, talk the ocean's tongue. He knows; he's always known. He learned the language of water before he was born.

* * *

_shed blood becomes a sea_

* * *

The shore eventually beckons, and he swims back in with a large tuna, the streamlined body all fine scale and muscle. Good eating. Hidan not where he'd been left. Kakuzu ties the fish in a loop, running thread through the gasping mouth out the gills looping around the tail and back to the beginning again, and hangs the fish from a tree. Then goes a-searching. 

He found his partner on a rocky outcrop, where the priest has braced the blunt end of his pike between some stones, stood on tip-toes, and impaled himself under the arms sideways, through both lungs. One pale hand lifts over his heart, the other drooping, bestowing vague caresses to the lance. Bloody froth sputtering between his lips like sea foam, and blood striping brightly across the pale flesh of his chest. The man in rapture, garnet eyes agleam with serene exultation. At least he'd taken off his cloak; it was folded neatly on the beach, with a rock on top so it wouldn't fly away.

The pewter sea rolls beyond him, like two people under a blanket, caught in a tumultuous and violent love.

Kakuzu taps his foot. "Are you about done?" he grates, noting irritably how slowly Hidan's eyes roll to track him. The Jashinist has lost a lot of blood and won't be up to par for a few days at least.

"Hfff... motherfucker..." his partner responds, words burbly and half-swallowed. Kakuzu watches in disgust as a bubble of blood inflates, then pops, at Hidan's lips. "Couldn't you... wait... just twenty more minutes..?"

"You do this every time we stop for more than a few hours," Kakuzu says flatly. "And I have to clean up after you every time. It will take time even for you to recover from the blood loss, and I have to work harder to make up for your lack. Furthermore, you're ruining the view."

Slowly, Hidan turns his hand and flips his partner off.

Kakuzu snorts irritably. Well, fine. "Don't blame me if salt gets in the wound and stings," he snaps, and turns back towards the campsite.

* * *

_little anodynes that deaden suffering_

* * *

The Falls-nin has an old fondness for citrus fruits, a long-embedded liking he has allowed to persist only because in the long run it costs him nothing. Lemons, limes, blood oranges, all breathing sharp clean scents, juicy and dripping with their own innards. The kind of fruits that freshen the air, where when juices get into wounds, it stings. 

He can be patient peeling them, pulling the neat sections apart, ingesting each slice. There's a rhythm in peeling an orange like there's a rhythm in weaving or palming coins or killing or his other, more violent forms of moving meditation, and the payoff is always good.

He hasn't got a memory of where he began to like them, but sitting on the roof of headquarters at evening with the sun hanging heavy and low, filling the lap of his rope with heavy oranges and his lungs with the pure smell of juice – he's happy there, sort of, or at least at peace.

* * *

_quick at your word, all skill, grace,  
he is, but for death his passion, flawless_

* * *

A sunny noon battlefield. Kakuzu would rather have rain – it would keep the stink down, and the flies. As it is they buzz slowly around him and are prodigiously bold, black bodies caught in his robes and sneaking occasionally behind his mask. He catches them there with threads, and decapitates them delicately, flicking the chitinous bodies away. Hidan brushes irritably at his forehead and hair, disliking the slow bumbling way the flies glance against his skin. He has lost his hat somewhere and may be beginning to sunburn. This idea gives Kakuzu a slow roll of malicious satisfaction. 

When Hidan is not trying to take cover in Kakuzu's shadow he admires the massacre they are passing. "Someone did nice work here," he says approvingly, surveying a woman with three pikes forced through her abdomen and one leg hacked off at the knee. Her guts have bulged out, the intestines split and reeking, and roiling with a swarm of flies. "I like it. Seriously."

Kakuzu is more concerned with finding a nice place to have lunch. He walks past the bodies, unkindly pitched together in a mound of rotting flesh; men and women with empty sockets where crows picked out the eyes and open mouths where they died whimpering. The indignity of a commonplace shinobi's death, left anonymous on the killing field. Flies buzzing, fat and sated on human juices, brushing his face.

This is what he saw that made him determined not to be regular. This is what he remembers without remembering, and what he rejects.

* * *

_immigrants and revolutionists_

* * *

Kakuzu has never told anyone, and those who might remember are now dead, but he was not actually born in the Hidden Village of the Falls. He was born before shinobi had these nuclei, in fact; a seashore brat, born to a woman who told her kinsfolk that a sea god had impregnated her. And he slipped out of her womb in a tangle of blackness, and somehow in that brutal time his fellow villagers didn't kill him, because obviously from his form he was the product of a sea god truly – thus blessed, or cursed, and bad luck to lay hand on either way. 

He lived, catching fish and swallowing them, eating meat and shitting, running hard and sleeping, until at seven he put his mind to it and wove a human form, and walked out on land with the rest of them. Made himself grow with the rest of them, ten, thirteen, sixteen as a raw-boned little brute who could do what he pleased. Equipped, although he didn't know it, with all of the things that would make him one of the most deadly shinobi that Nippon had ever seen.

And at sixteen, he killed a man, in a dispute over a steel fishing hook he'd bought with his own money. The man was a traveler, a shinobi, although he wasn't a good one and Kakuzu didn't know it. A shinobi of the Village hidden in the Falls.

And that was how they found him.

And that was why he was taken in, a conscript, a fighter recruited to make up for the life he'd taken. To make restitution if not amends.

Does he regret it?

No.

Would he do it differently...?

* * *

_a thinking woman sleeps with monsters_

* * *

The rest of the Akatsuki aren't terrible company on the average. Kakuzu gets on well enough with Kisame and Zetsu, and he enjoyed Sasori's company before the puppeteer's death. Pein is distant but decent. Konan is palely kind. 

It makes him wonder how she ended up here, this blue woman, a great lover of delicacy, with the white flower perching like a benediction behind her ear. She is mostly silent, patient, boiling water and soaking her tea bag with the same class with which she pushes a kunai through someone's gut. What's more, she makes enough water to have tea for two.

The warmth of the mug is pleasant between his hands. Kakuzu gazes into his tea, lets it steep. Konan daintily drops lumps of sugar into her own brew, deceptively placid eyes cast downward. He knows better: she is a lens, she is paying attention even if she does not seem to be. Konan keeps an eye on her comrades.

It could be a risk to him, thus, passing slack time with her. But maybe it's the tint of danger that intrigues him and draws him in closer. Kakuzu's old enough to not expect anything new or exciting out of his companions, but still, there's always a chance... and she's intelligent. Which makes it moderately interesting.

"How did you find your mission, Kakuzu?" she asks him, voice throaty, hands as light as the butterflies she emulates. He turns his mug in a circle, watching color bloom from the tea bag, the water twist into a miniature whirlpool.

"Simple enough," he replies. "The Nibi was no particular challenge... nothing surprising..."

"And the monk?"

"An easy kill. Hidan pitched a fit, killing another holy man." But the profit was decent, enough to make the bitching worthwhile.

"But of course," says Konan, lowering her darkened eyelids. She smiles so slightly, and he knows, this is just what she expects out of him too. Maybe, then, he spends time with her because they know what to expect out of each other, and long association has rubbed out all the rough and bitter spots on their more distant partnership, enough that he'll actually be seen with her by choice. Perhaps.

"Oh, Kakuzu," she says, mild and daring, the confidence that comes with freedom from retribution. Well-coiffed fingers brush his large hand. "You have something caught in your ring...?"

He does not withdraw or flinch, but runs his thumb lightly to catch the gleaming strands twined around his finger. In spite of their near-transparent fineness they do not break... He knows it does not matter to Konan what they are, who they are from, only that she is inscrutably amused at what she might interpret as sentimentality or emotion. She won't ever grasp what made him do it, not entirely; she won't live long enough, won't see enough.

So what he tells her is, "Just something I picked up along the road."

Nii Yugito's blond hairs, woven into a small garland. Because she was a pawn who wouldn't acknowledge it. Because she put up a good fight, in the face of inevitability.

* * *

_so keep your silence and know_

_this man unless slain is fated to die_

* * *

Hidan is gorgeous, a brutal young killer, like a panther. All smiles and hot bile, he loves his work, revels in it, and will for as long he lives, straining towards oblivion. 

He asks Kakuzu the kind of questions that the Falls-nin would rather submerge under all his other concerns; that's just the way he is, the kind of philosophy he has. To stick a finger in a wound and see how many maggots he can churn up.

Though Kakuzu is quite literally thick-skinned.

And he hates that man, his pretty white partner, and he'll find a way to do him in, someday. By hook by crook, by fire by water... some way to take the pious killer out forever. That so-much-better-than-you smirk he always wears gone, the deceptive baby face that makes other travelers glance at Hidan and hesitate before moving on.

Not that Kakuzu hesitates. Everything is just some variant of something else familiar, and Hidan has had his counterparts too, the little surprises blurring into overall form of the canvas. Though sometimes, when the light gilds his hair bright, or he bows his head silently to count the beads of his rosary...

Kakuzu might think his partner is, just a little, beautiful. In the way of something that's bound to fall.

Not that he'd ever tell anyone.

* * *

_September 23, 2007._


End file.
